SSME: FRAMING AND POSITIONING

Christopher Lovelock
School of Management, Yale University

1. What could derail SSME?

DISCUSS: What should worry us the most?

2. What have we learned about service innovation

from an academic perspective in marketing?
DISCUSS: What are the key service innovation
research priorities? How can industry and academia
collaborate most effectively?
Slide © 2005 Christopher Lovelock
 Not the Desired Outcome for SSME…

Slide © 2007 Christopher Lovelock

 Factors that might impede achievement of SSME goals of
identifying, analyzing, and profitably solving business-
related issues in the service sector

• Using flawed data for modeling and decision-making (GIGO)

• Focusing on backstage activities without reference to their impact
on customers front stage
• Designing hardware, software, and physical or virtual
environments that aren’t user-friendly for customers or employees
• Over-emphasis on productivity improvements at expense of
achieving service quality and end-user satisfaction
• “Siloization" of managerial or academic departments that blocks or
compromises trans-disciplinary communications, research,
teaching, and implementation

Slide © 2007 Christopher Lovelock

 Developing Methodologies for Service Innovation
(less known about services than manufactured goods)
 What are KSF? Research into new financial services identified:
 Good fit with firm’s resources, expertise, image
 Superior advantage to competing services in meeting customers’ needs
 Strong inter-functional coordination, participants understood why involved
 Well-executed market research obtained relevant information

 How much structure to innovation process?

 Swedish research in telecoms, transport, and financial services argues for
limits to degree of structure imposed: “There must be some elements of
improvisation, anarchy, and internal competition”
 Singapore Airlines employs both “hard” and “soft” approaches:
- Well-defined and structured innovation framework with fixed points, typically
through centralized product development department
- Flexible, emergent process focusing on continuous improvement, mainly
through departments such as in-flight and ground services, loyalty marketing
 What role for users?
 At idea-generation stage, research on telecoms judged users’ ideas for
innovations as more original, with higher-perceived value than those
created by professional service developers, but harder to commercialize
Slide © 2007 Christopher Lovelock